Review: Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on Two Grand Pianos at Carnegie Hall

Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock strolled onstage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night like a longtime comedy team. Both were members of Miles Davis groups, both have widely recorded on electric keyboards as well as piano, and both are among jazz’s greatest pianists. But the last time Mr. Hancock and Mr. Corea toured as a duo was in the late 1970s before resuming celebrated solo careers.

Still, camaraderie reigned, down to level of note-by-note interaction. Basking in the applause that greeted them, they reminisced about when they lived in New York City in the 1960s; they hinted at the concert to come. “How do they know what we’re going to do when we don’t know what we’re going to do?” Mr. Corea mused. As they moved toward their grand pianos, Mr. Hancock added, “You thought we were joking.”

With that, they were off into a chromatic wilderness. For nearly the entire concert, Mr. Hancock and Mr. Corea played as if each had vowed never to let the other play alone for long, while retaining the prerogatives of a soloist. It made for a night of dense yet remarkably transparent music; what could have been endless collisions were kaleidoscopic overlays instead. Their two very distinct styles could still be discerned: Mr. Hancock’s bluesiness and through-the-looking-glass harmonies, Mr. Corea’s pinging melodies and hints of flamenco, Chopin and Stravinsky. But they often merged into a glorious, vertiginous rush of ideas.

In the opening piece, one pianist, often Mr. Hancock, would splash through chords and clusters on the way to an intricately rippling ostinato; the other would dip into it, place a bright improvised tune atop it and start nudging it toward its next harmonic transformation, shifting the implied groove or streaking around the keyboard to set off a supersonic two-man chase.

The difference between their 1970s duo concerts and this one was that Mr. Hancock and Mr. Corea both brought synthesizers onstage as well. The one electronic duet on Thursday was their most unmeshed music, an inventory of sounds (sometimes changing midnote) that wandered from spooky tones toward comedy. There was palpable, though respectful, relief when Mr. Corea made the first move back to piano.

They played a breakneck new piece by Mr. Corea — “I received an email and that was in it,” Mr. Hancock said afterward — before returning to familiar material.

Davis’s “All Blues” unfurled new implications for its open-ended harmonies. On Mr. Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” Mr. Corea playfully challenged the rolling rhythm of its familiar vamp with syncopations and polytonal toppings of his own. Mr. Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” began as a rapt, luminous meditation, with its theme peeking out one tentative note at a time, before the duo teased it toward a waltz and sent it spiraling through key changes.

For the finale, Mr. Corea enlisted the audience, dividing it into five parts (two male, three female) to share a minor chord. They offered reverently elaborated sections of “Concierto de Aranjuez,” the Joaquín Rodrigo composition that Miles Davis redid on “Sketches of Spain,” returning to the chord for the audience to sing, then accelerated into Mr. Corea’s “Spain,” with more audience call and response, to end on a final, euphonious chord with the audience. It was comedy again, but underpinned with the deepest musicianship.